When an economist turns into a winemaker

My friend Mitch Feierstein is a jolly, cheerful, life-enhancing fellow. He is emphatically not one of those economists whose purse-lipped response to any new phenomenon is ‘no good will come of this’ and who have predicted six of the past two recessions. But he is a profound pessimist. In a book he published last year, Planet Ponzi, he devotes page after relentless page to the troubles of the world economy. He depicts the West as a ship without engine or rudder, adrift on a sea of bad debt, worse paper and wholly unrealistic expectations. It is even gloomier than the voyage of the Ancient Mariner. He at least found redemption.

There may be only one way out. Perhaps a global ‘bad bank’ could corral all the valueless paper and gradually write it away, without producing hyperinflation and destroying the few surviving moral underpinnings of the international financial system. Perhaps. In the short run, like the Russian grand duke, Mitch believes that between the revolution and the firing squad, there is always time for a bottle of champagne.